Who Can Benefit?

NeuroMovement can be an adjunct or an alternative to medical treatment, as well as helping people who want to improve functioning, including reaching beyond current plateaus of performance. NeuroMovement offers potential benefits for:

You can experience the benefits of NeuroMovement in two ways at my studio in North Arlington, Virginia.

  

1.	Private hands-on movement lessons while you lie on a massage table or sit on a chair, fully clothed. • 40-60 minute lessons for adults and adolescents • 20-40 minute lessons for children (up to 12 years old)
2.	One-hour group Transformational Movement Lessons, scheduled by request • We can schedule a group lesson at your convenience for 3-5 people at my studio in North Arlington. • Alternatively, we can schedule a group lesson at your preferred location.
The best way to appreciate the power of NeuroMovement is to experience it! Please get in touch if you'd like to schedule a one-on-one session or a private group lesson.

What makes NeuroMovement distinctive?

NeuroMovement offers a dynamic approach to communicating with the brain in new ways through carefully designed and executed movements.

It is about creating and expanding possibilities by engaging the nervous system with what is most available and building upon that, rather than focusing on what is most compromised. (As Anat Baniel likes to say, "If a person COULD do [fill in the blank], s/he WOULD do it!")

NeuroMovement is not only for people who have a specific challenge -- but where there is a challenge, including any sort of developmental problem, existing abilities are highlighted and strengthened. This supports the brain's capacity to expand this learning and extend it to areas that have not been readily amenable to improvement -- thus tapping into the increasingly well-recognized plasticity of our brains, no matter our condition or age.

NeuroMovement evolved from the pioneering learning-through-movement innovations of Moshe Feldenkrais, www.FeldenkraisMethod.com.

NeuroMovement is structured around "Nine Essentials" -- nine principles that distinguish this process.

These principles inform everything that the practitioner does and shape every experience that the client receives. The way these qualities are defined, applied and employed are unique to ABM, even though elements of them appear in many other contexts.


The Nine Essentials are:

•	Movement with attention
•	Slow
•	Variation
•	Subtlety (exceptionally gentle, small movements)
•	Enthusiasm (appreciating every experience and every nuance of change)
•	Flexible goals (being open to all possibilities, rather than aiming to "fix" problems)
•	Activating the "learning switch" of the brain
•	Imagination and dreams
•	Awareness

My personal story

I enrolled in NeuroMovement training after seeing extraordinary changes in myself through study with a local practitioner. I began taking NeuroMovement lessons in search of new ways to address some long-standing issues that had been improved but not resolved through years of dedicated practice of hatha yoga, weight training, lap swimming, walking and dancing.

I was intrigued by the subtlety and refinement of the NeuroMovement work. It somehow brought new intuition and insights:
 

•	I began to notice ways to improve my lap swimming, fairly regularly (and continuing to this day); for example, slightly altering a stroke, balancing my breathing as I turned my head to each side, and so on.
•	After several months, I had an Ah-Hah! moment when I actually "saw" myself sitting in a somewhat awkward but habitual way and realized that this was probably contributing to chronic lower back discomfort. I am now almost entirely free of this problem.
•	My performance of improv comedy has improved -- I am able to think and react more fluidly.
•	AND .... my vision has improved significantly! This was a huge, very welcome surprise that occurred a few months into my NeuroMovement training. I had tried vision therapy and also yoga exercises for the eyes off and on for many years because my eyes have trouble focusing together. After one of our NeuroMovement training segments, I began to get headaches. I had a feeling that I should pull out my spare eyeglasses, which are six years old. Voila! My current eyeglasses had become too strong!

What the experts say:

"I have spent much of my own scientific career trying to understand how we can harness our capacity for brain remodeling for the benefit of children and adults in need of neurological help. From several decades of research... we scientists have defined the 'rules' governing brain plasticity in neurological terms. We now know how to drive brains to change for the better... My friend Anat Baniel, working in parallel along a completely different path, has defined almost exactly the same rules."

-	Dr. Michael Merzenich, Leading pioneer in brain plasticity research, Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Posit Science (Quote from book foreword of Kids Beyond Limits by Anat Baniel, http://www.anatbanielmethod.com/michael-merzenich)

"Anat Baniel... applies the exact same principles when helping people overcome limitation that I used to recover my brain and body from stroke. Anat understands that for any meaningful change to happen in the way we think, move, and use our body, the change has to happen in the brain. By shifting the focus of rehabilitation from the muscles and bones to the brain, we unleash the staggering potential of the brain to heal itself."
 

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Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, Neuroanatomist, National Spokesperson for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center (Harvard Brain Bank), author of My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (TED talk and 2008 book) (Quote from conversation between Jill Bolte Taylor and Anat Baniel, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anat-baniel/conversation_b_5235073.html)

Contact us:
Faith Halter, Insightful Transitions
Tel. 703-358-9489